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SCIENCE 



[Vol. LV, No. 1430 



it, just as the finer analyses of the exchanges 

 of gas between the air and the blood and be- 

 tween the blood and the body substance have 

 been made with us. The actual modes by which 

 oxygen is used by the tissues of the body, its 

 special relations to muscular contraction, the 

 chemical results of that contraction, the thermal 

 laws which it oteys — all these fundamental 

 problems of living matter have seen the most 

 significant steps to their solution taken within 

 the past generation in this country. 



Work of this kind brings permanent enrich- 

 ment to the intellectual life of mankind by 

 giving new and fuller conceptions of the nature 

 of the living organism. That we may think is 

 its highest function ; but it does more than this. 

 Just as all gains in the knowledge of Nature 

 bring increase of power, so these discoveries of 

 the past fifty years have their place in the 

 fixed foundations upon which alone the science 

 and the arts of medicine now or in the future 

 can be securely based. The special study of 

 disease, its cure and prevention, has had notable 

 triumphs here and elsewhere in the same half- 

 eentury, and these as they come must make as 

 a rule a more spectacular appeal to the on- 

 looker. Yet it is the aceimiulating knowledge 

 of the basal laws of life and of the living or- 

 ganism to which alone we can look for the sure 

 establishment either of the study of disease or 

 of the applied sciences of medicine. As we 

 have seen, thei'e are few indeed among the fields 

 of inquiry in the whole range of physiology in 

 which the British contributions to the common 

 stock of ascertained knowledge or of fertile 

 idea do not take a foremost place. It would be 

 impiety not to honor, as it would be stupidity 

 to ignore, these plain facts, which, indeed, are 

 now perhaps more commonly admitted abroad 

 than recognized at home. There is no occasion 

 here for any spirit of national complacency — 

 rather the reverse, indeed. British workers at 

 no time earlier than the war have had the 

 menial assistance or other resources which their 

 colleagues in other countries have commonly 

 commanded, and too often the secondary and 

 relatively easy developments of pioneer work 

 done in this country have fallen to well- 

 equipped and well-served workers elsewhere. 

 If in the past half-century better support had 



been available from public or private sources, 

 or at the older vmiversities from college endow- 

 ments, it is impossible for any well-informed 

 person to doubt that a more extended, if not a 

 more diversified, harvest would have been won. 

 We stand too near to this remarkable epoch 

 of progress to appraise it fairly. In the same 

 span of years Nature has yielded many fresh 

 secrets in the physical world under cross- 

 examination by new devices which have them- 

 selves been lately won by patient waiting upon 

 her. So great a revelation of physical truth 

 has been lately made in this country, bringing 

 conceptions of space and of matter so swiftly 

 changing and extending, that our eyes are 

 easily dimmed to the wonders of that other 

 new world being unfolded to us in the explora- 

 tion of the living organism. Only the lapse 

 of time can resolve the true values of this or 

 that direction of inquiry, if indeed there be 

 any true calculus of "value" here at all. We 

 seem to see in the progress of physiology, not 

 at few but at many points, that we stand upon 

 new paths just opening before us, which must 

 certainly — as it seems — lead quickly to new 

 light, to fuller vision, and to other paths be- 

 yond. The advances of the next half-century 

 to come must far exceed and outshine those due 

 to the efforts of the half-century just closing; 

 that is probably the personal conviction of us 

 all. Yet we may still believe that through all 

 the history of mankind recognition will be given 

 and honor be paid to the steps in knowledge 

 which were made first and made securely in the 

 period we now review. The men who have 

 done this work will not take pride in it for 

 themselves; they know that their strength has 

 not been their own, but that of the beauty 

 which attracted them, and of the discipline 

 which they obeyed. They count themselves 

 happy to have found their favored path. Other 

 and more acute minds might have usurped their 

 places and found greater happiness for them- 

 selves if, under a social ordering of another 

 kind, they had been turned to the increase of 

 knowledge instead of to the ephemeral, barren, 

 or insoluble problems of convention and com- 

 petition. By how much the realized progress 

 towards truth and the power brought by truth 

 might have been increased under a changed 



